Very recently, I was informed of a new service called Quamut.  Launched by Barnes and Noble, Quamut is a service that offers many guides to life – their slogan is “The go to how to”.  I was immediately interested, and even had the opportunity to receive a couple of guides to read from Barnes and Noble.  Quamut refers to one of their guides as a Quamut, but in our report, I’ll be calling it a guide to dissolve most of the confusion.  …yeah, it sounds a bit weird, but I think you’ll eventually get what I was trying to say.  If not, just ignore the statement and continue.

You might think that I exaggerate when I say that a Quamut serves as the guides of life – I do not.  Quamut has guides on pretty much everything, from songwriting to fly fishing.  I received guides on Home Plumbing, Basic Cooking, as well as Buying a Hybrid Car.  While I’m not an expert on either of these subjects, and thus, can not evaluate them from that perspective, I can tell you that I did learn a lot from all of these guides to-go.  These guides to-go cost USD$2.95, but Quamut offers guides for free over the Internet.  Furthermore, a different .pdf of a guide to-go is available for a free download daily, which serves as extra incentive to check out their site regularly.  In that sense, I think they did a top-notch job in making the site very attractive.

Very Easy on the Eyes

As I scanned my Quamut guide, I noticed that the important information popped out at me – which is because Quamut took care to highlight the most important vocabulary with bolded text or in a red colour.  Furthermore, the diagrams included were  very useful in helping me build an idea of what kind of information they were trying to convey.  Although I found the text to be a bit small for my taste, I guess that’s justifiable to save on the amount of material used – plus, I know that I would much rather carry around a zippy, thin folder of information as opposed to a lugging around a huge binder.

Strictly for Newbies Only

While I did find the guides to be good reading, I also took them to an expert – Jonathan, of APH Networks, for appraisal.  To be specific, he was interested in the guide on Buying a Hybrid Car.  He did report that while the guide was generally pretty accurate, the information seemed to be tilted towards persuading the reader to purchase a hybrid car, and on occasion didn’t show both sides of the story.  For example: many negative aspects of hybrids are not mentioned – such as the effects the nickel batteries have on the environment, or how the hybrid standards have been revised since the article was written, and in fact, the article overall looks more like a promotional article for hybrid vehicles.

From the perspective of a newbie, however, I found the Quamut guide to be very informative and comprehensive.  Because the errors were relatively minor, most of the information actually made perfect sense to me, although it did take me a while to absorb the whole thing – it’s actually quite a good amount of reading, in case you were wondering.

I guess the conclusion that we arrived at was that while Quamut guides are great for newbies, they should only be read by newbies and not by any experts – however, it’s not likely that experts will flock to read Quamut guides – if they’re so knowledgeable about a subject already, why would they read a guide for newbies (unless they wanted to teach, or were very modest)?

Final Conclusion

Quamut guides: if you want to learn something, they’re probably the best place to turn to.  Quamut’s guides are generally very accurate, although experts on certain subjects will be able to find a few errors scattered here and there.  The guides are available free, so I can’t see a reason not to – and if you end up loving them as much as I did, you’d probably be compelled to purchase .pdf’s of them for $2.95 or even the quality-printed guides that can be found at Barnes and Noble.

Thanks to Madison Dunn for informing me about Quamut, and taking the time and care to mail those Quamut guides!